Valerie Plame, the former CIA officer who was infamously outed during the Bush administration, was on CNN yesterday to react to the accidental outing of another CIA official this week. Plame called it colossally stupid, but made it clear this is in no way equivalent to what happened to her. Plames outing over ten years ago turned into a full-fledged scandal that implicated a number of Bush administration officials, which she doesnt believe is in par with one persons colossally stupid accident.

Plame told Wolf Blitzer this weeks embarrassment was an error of huge proportions with tremendous consequences, but the difference here is, she said, my name was intended to be leaked in retaliation against my husband, who was a fierce critic of the Bush administration and the Iraq War.

On this particular case, Plame did say it raises a serious issue of security clearances and how many people should get them. And furthermore, there are plenty of disastrous implications of a CIA station chiefs name being out there when that information may end up in the hands of people who might want to inflict serious harm upon them.

Ah, the swinger couple of DC— when it was she who recommended her leftist husband Wilson be sent to Niger about yellow cake. She couldn’t think of ANYONE else to send..... riiiight. Plame and Wilson have made a career of their corruption.

And folks, she was never undercover except as it applies to all CIA personnel in certain sections. Chief of Station? This was deliberate, and only remains to be seen, by whom? Assuredly we will never know.

The gelded military may have outed a warrior who doesn’t play ball with the one and the islamos who run our intel operations. Or the islamos who run our intel set the military up to out him. It is how one blows a cover. Chop Chop, the King!

The fame/attention issue is spot on. It’s clear that both her and her husband enjoyed the attention and were more than happy to be the face and tip of the spear for the political attack. They saw an opportunity to raise their public and political profile by exploiting the issue and acted appropriately.

Someone needs to tell this ditz that her 15 minutes are up. The REAL “biggest difference” is that she was behind a desk in the US and the agent whose name was “leaked” by the Obama regime is a station chief in the field in a foreign country.

10
posted on 05/30/2014 7:22:05 AM PDT
by FlingWingFlyer
(Obama's smidgens are coming home to roost.)

I see Miss Plame has a rather high opinion of herself if she thinks her situation was more severe than the outing of the CIA section chief in Afghanistan. You’ve had your fifteen minutes of fame. You were a nobody then and you’re still a nobody now. Go away Miss Plame!

Plame was not a covert or field agent. She was a desk jockey. No comparison whatsoever, which is why she immediately sought the spotlight and cameras and ropelines. The Afghanistan CIA station chief is currently in hiding and terrified, as he has any number of people who want him killed.

She’s right—there is a difference: she was a mere spoke, a low-level office drudge/political hack, while the man the White House recently `pants-ed’ in front of the world was a wheel, a real CIA deal.

But not to fear, this shocking negligence will fade away, like all the other WH omissions, thanks to the Democrats’ MSM.
A Republican doing things like this would have been forced to resign by the McCains, McConnells, Cantors and Boehners years ago, meekly tugging their forelocks, to the drumbeat of the alphabit news, weekly mags and TeeVee heads.

Plames outing over ten years ago turned into a full-fledged scandal that implicated a number of Bush administration officials

Falsely, erroneously, maliciously "implicated a number of Bush administration officials".

When it came out that Richard Armitage of the State Department had leaked it, leaving Scooter Libby and a number of others to twist in the wind for months, the media didn't even bother to play their equivalent of the "wah wah wahhhhh" trumpet before walking away from the matter.

Plame was undercover when she was outed. The fact that she had moved back to CIA headquarters did not merit her identification, in part because she occasionally left Langley, Va., to conduct covert operations overseas.

The injustice really is the indictment of Scooter Libby.

The fact that former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage was Robert Novaks source for Plames identity  rather than Libby, former chief of staff to thenvice president Dick Cheney  and the Proescutor KNEW this already early on SHOULD HAVE STOPPED THE INVESTIGATION.

Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald already knew this and took Libby to trial anyway.

Armitage stayed mum as Libby was dragged through court. Secretary of State Colin Powell was equally quiet, though he seemingly was aware of this injustice.

Plame was a non-covert "covert" agent living in DC whose husband Joe Wilson outed her long before Richard Armitage. Scooter Libby had nothing to do with any of it, other than being stupid enough to cooperate with Patrick Sleaze Fitzgerald.

The guy Ubama outed was an actual covert agent stationed on foreign soil.

21
posted on 05/30/2014 7:46:50 AM PDT
by E. Pluribus Unum
("The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government." --Tacitus)

Let’s not forget that Novak let Libby (and Rove) twist as well. He could simply have said, “Libby was not the source.” It would have stopped the nonsense. So I suspect that Rove and or Libby also talked to Novak about Plame, but that the true source was Armitage and one of the other two or both confirmed it for Novak, so as a result he couldn’t openly state that Libby wasn’t the source. None of that ever happened however and the rest is history

Plame told Wolf Blitzer this weeks embarrassment was an error of huge proportions with tremendous consequences, but the difference here is, she said, my name was intended to be leaked in retaliation against my husband, who was a fierce critic of the Bush administration and the Iraq War.

No, it wasn't. I can't believe she is still repeating that meme, even after it was proved this is incorrect.

Plame was inadvertantly "out'ed" by Richard Armitrage, in the State Department. He told Robert Novak that she worked for the CIA, because he had seen her name on some material from the agency. However, Armitrage did not know she was a "covert" agent (and had no reason to know). So, he didn't knowingly disclose her covert status, and was not prosecuted.

The Attorney General and the special prosecutor knew this at the outset of the investigation, because Armitrage told them. And they told him to keep quiet, while they continued the "investigation" anyway, and managed to maneuver Scooter Libby into an error that they could portray as intentional.

(For anyone that doesn't know the error: Libby claimed in an FBI interview, and subsequent grand jury testimony, that he first learned about Plame's covert assignment from Dick Cheney, and then subsequently from Tim Russert. Russert countered he didn't tell Libby. This difference in recollection turned into an indictment and conviction for Libby -- not for "outing" Plame, but for "obstructing justice" and perjury).

See my previous post (just before yours), which went up about 1 second before you. :-)

Libby was convicted for intentionally lying to investigators and a grand jury. Of course, I haven't seen all the evidence, but what I've read indicates that it was nothing but an error in recollection -- where Libby first heard about Plame.

But, there was never any evidence that Libby actually repeated it: only that he somehow knew about it before he claimed.

She’s such a liar. Her “outing” was a slip by Armitage, and the ensuing witch hunt proved there was no intent or coordination. Poor Scooter Libby was caught by a perjury trap thrown out there by a special prosector desperate to get ANYTHING, despite knowing all about Armitage in the first week.

And there was nothing to “out” anyway. She openly commuted to her desk job at Langley - kind of hard to be a super-secret spy when anyone who cared to check would clearly see she was with the CIA.

31
posted on 05/30/2014 8:11:49 AM PDT
by kevkrom
(I'm not an unreasonable man... well, actually, I am. But hear me out anyway.)

The gelded military may have outed a warrior who doesnt play ball with the one and the islamos who run our intel operations. Or the islamos who run our intel set the military up to out him. It is how one blows a cover. Chop Chop, the King!

I can't help but wonder if this "outing" was the whole purpose of this trip.

32
posted on 05/30/2014 8:14:24 AM PDT
by BerryDingle
(I know how to deal with communists, I still wear their scars on my back from Hollywood-Ronald Reagan)

Novak got Valeries last name from Wilsons bio in Whos Who. But after he used it in his column, the name Valerie Plame became big news in the media and caused quite a storm. On October 1, 2003, after reading a second column by Novak on the case, Armitage, alarmed by the clamor in the press for the name of the leaker who had outed a covert CIA agent, revealed his role to his boss Secretary of State Colin Powell. They took up the matter with State Department lawyer William H. Taft IV, who then spoke with White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who allegedly told Taft that he did not want to know. But why didn’t Taft or Powell go directly to the President with this important information?

Among the many things that should give a thinking person pause about this whole sad story is that Patrick Fitzgerald knew from the outset who had leaked the information about Wilsons wife to Bob Novak. It had been Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage, who told the Justice Department that he had leaked the information to Novak, but kept what he had done from the White House. Armitage would later admit that he had even earlier told journalist Bob Woodward about Wilsons wifes employment. Indeed, on Bob Woodwards tape of the June 13, 2003, conversation, Armitage can be heard leaking the fact that Wilsons wife worked at the CIA four separate times.

The Vice President knew that all of this could have been avoided had Secretary Colin Powell done his duty and told the President that he knew who had leaked Plames identity to Novak. But he preferred to remain silent, and thus opened the door to two years of a needless and wasteful investigation which distracted the administration, forced innocent staff members to undergo a costly inquisition, and led to the conviction of a loyal and highly competent public servant. Cheney made sure that the public would know the truth and took a parting shot at Colin Powell.

I was familiar with the evidence, having read all the pleadings and followed the case closely. The jury got it right. Libby was misleading the investigators, which is a no-no. What he claimed was that he was not aware that Plame worked at the CIA (nothing about “covert,” flat out he said he didn’t know she worked there until he read it in the paper saw it on teevee). But he had specifically requested and received information about her, and “shopped” that information around to reporters.

One of the most disgraceful acts of treachery by professing Republicans was General Colin Powells endorsement of Barack Hussein Obama for Presidentnot once but twice. Its so obvious that he followed a number of other African-Americans in voting on skin color. Of course, he wasnt as candid as Samuel L. Jackson: I voted for Barack because he was black. [Obamas] message didnt mean **** to me.

So Powell has ever since rationalized to the public why he did so. This has degenerated into increasingly shrill and irrational attacks on the Republican Party to which he still claims allegiance. Recently, this has included a bitter tirade to the liberal David Gregory of MSNBC (which Mark Levin calls MSLSD). Remember Gregorythe anti-gun zealot who mocked the NRA leader for proposing armed guards in schools, but sends his kids to a school with 11 armed guards?

However, although Powell was once much admired as a Republican military man, his outburst should not have surprised people.

But even worse was the Valerie Plame affair. Plame is the wife of Joe Wilson, a noisy opponent of the war to remove mass-murderer Saddam Hussein, and it was leaked to the late columnist Robert Novak that she worked for the CIA. The Demagogue party and the Leftmedia wanted to catch some top Republicans in this crime, such as VP Dick Cheney and his assistant Lewis (Scooter) Libby. And the appeasing Republicans appointed a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, who went Inspector Javert on Libby.

However, the real leaker was Powells assistant, Richard Armitage. But special prosecutions take on a life of their own, far from the original crime, simply so the funding can continuemuch like government programs in general. Javert/Fitzgerald, even after belatedly knowing that Armitage was the leaker, was determined to nail Libby for something. This was perjurywhich in this case meant that Libby didnt remember what he told a reporter about a crime he didnt even commit. A blot on President Bush Jr.s legacy was refusing to pardon Libbynot the first time he was disloyal to his own people.

But the real lack of integrity was Powells, because he stayed silent as Fitzgerald made Libbys life hell for the non-crime that he didnt even commit. Sam Blumenfeld writes:

The Vice President knew that all of this could have been avoided had Secretary Colin Powell done his duty and told the President that he knew who had leaked Plames identity to Novak. But he preferred to remain silent, and thus opened the door to two years of a needless and wasteful investigation which distracted the administration, forced innocent staff members to undergo a costly inquisition, and led to the conviction of a loyal and highly competent public servant. Had Powell told the President the truth, there would have been no need for a special prosecutor or grand inquisition.

Theres also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities.

Powell also claimed:

When I see a former governor say that the president is shuckin and jivinThats a racial-era slave term.

Powell is stooping low to attack Governor Sarah Palin this way when she hasnt a racist bone in her body. But its typical of leftist demagoguery to call any criticism of Obama racisteven when the issue is big spending, class warfare, hatred of Israel, or anti-business rhetoric. Apparently leftists have a magic decoder ring, whereby all these issues are code words for Obama is black. I also didnt notice Powell criticize Democrat Andrew Cuomo, then Attorney General of NY (and now Governor), for saying You cant shuck and jive at a press conference during Obamas war with Hillary Clinton in the Dem primaries.

Armitrage didn't know Plame was a covert CIA agent. He thought she just worked for the CIA, and that's what he told Novak.

Armitrage apparently learned about Plame from a State Department memo, which made no mention of her covert status. Technically, the author of that memo is the one that made the unauthorized disclosure, but he/she has never been identified.

Working from memory ... Libby, through official channels, requested and obtained information from CIA about "Wilson's wife." It was some official "inside the government" request, at any rate.

He either shopped it or hinted at confirmation to Tim Russert, Matt Cooper, and Judy Miller.

Whether he "shopped" it or not has no affect on his conviction. The misleading part of his cooperation with the investigation was his claim that he didn't know, except from reporters, that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA.

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